This book is a short yet rigorous course on a new paradigm in soil mechanics, one that holds that soil deformation occurs as a simple friction-based Poisson process in which soil particles move to their final position at random shear strains. It originates from work by Casagrande’s soil mechanics group at Harvard University that found that an aggregate of soil particles when sheared reaches a "steady-state" condition, a finding in line with the thermodynamics of dissipative systems. The book unpacks this new paradigm as it applies to soils. The theory explains fundamental, ubiquitous...